Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 719: Blood to pay 2

"FALL BACK!!"

"FALL BACK, DIANA!"

The comms screamed in her ear, Kelvin’s voice cracking through it at a volume that was genuinely painful. She pulled the earpiece out mid-stride and threw it sideways into the water without looking and kept running.

Kruel watched her come.

He didn’t move. Didn’t shift his weight or raise his hands or do anything that suggested what was approaching him required preparation. He just stood at the edge of the deep ruins with the water around his feet and watched her close the distance with the mild attention of something that had seen a lot of things approach it and had stopped finding the approach part interesting.

Diana hit him with the Shoal Shield at full sprint.

The Living Reef expanded on contact, the layered segments fanning outward, and the Tidal Rebound released everything it had stored from the atmospheric entry and the landing and the three seconds of running and put all of it into Kruel at the point of contact.

Kruel moved back two inches.

Two inches in the wet stone at the ruin’s edge, his feet carving shallow grooves as the force pushed him. He looked down at the grooves. Then at Diana.

She was already moving again, circling left, the orbital fragments breaking formation and hitting him from three angles simultaneously, the razor edges finding the joints at his shoulders and the softer tissue at the base of his horns and the exposed skin at his throat.

Blood. Dark, almost black, welling from the contact points.

Kruel reached up and touched his throat with two fingers. Looked at the blood on them. His expression didn’t change but something in his posture did, a small adjustment, the way something adjusted when it had been given a reason to stop being entirely relaxed.

Above them, Shade came out of nothing.

He dropped from directly overhead with the full weight of an Umbral Fang Dragon behind him and hit Kruel across the shoulders with both forelegs and the impact drove Kruel’s feet six inches into the stone. Six inches. The ruins around the impact point cracked in a ring, water flooding the new gaps, chunks of ancient stone sliding into the dark water with sounds like something giving up.

BOOM!

Shade’s corroding burst hit Kruel’s face at contact range.

The acid compound went to work immediately, the grey hide going dark at the contact points, the regeneration fighting it but the acid moving faster than the regeneration could keep up with in the first seconds, and Kruel made a sound. Not pain exactly. Something more like irritation, the sound of something that had been made to register a sensation it didn’t usually have to register.

He grabbed Shade by the throat and threw him.

Shade hit the water forty meters out and came up immediately, already turning, already masked, already gone from visual.

Diana was already at Kruel’s flank.

The shield came up and caught his backhand swing and the Living Reef took the force, absorbed it, distributed it across the layered surface and away from Diana’s arm, and she felt nothing. Not the impact. Not the shockwave. Nothing. The same nothing she had felt when Noah hit her at thirty percent in the storage room on the Eternal Pyre.

She drove the shield’s edge into his ribs.

Tidal Rebound. Everything the backhand had put into the shield came back out into his ribs at the point of contact. Kruel’s body registered it. She saw it in the way he shifted his weight, the micro-adjustment of something absorbing force it hadn’t expected from that direction.

"They’ve become faster," Kruel said.

He wasn’t complimenting her. He was updating his assessment the way you updated an assessment when new information arrived. Clinical and detached.

He hit her.

Not the backhand. A straight punch, full extension, aimed at the shield face, and the Living Reef expanded to full Coral Fortress and took it and Diana’s boots left the ground and she traveled twenty meters through the air before she landed and rolled and came up already moving back toward him.

Her hands were fine. Her arms were fine. The shield had taken everything.

But the ground where she had been standing was gone. The punch that had hit the shield had sent enough excess force into the terrain around the impact point that a three meter section of ruin floor had simply ceased to be solid.

She looked at it.

’He’s not trying yet,’ she thought.

She went back in anyway and from above her buddy was on his mark.

Shade came from above again, the second time he had dropped on Kruel from altitude, and this time Kruel didn’t turn to meet him. He waited. Let Shade commit to the descent fully, let the full weight and speed of the drop become irreversible, and then at the last possible moment he swung his tail.

The sound it made when it connected was wrong. Not the crack of impact. Something deeper. The sound of force being applied to mass at a ratio that the mass was never designed to handle.

Shade left the atmosphere.

Not metaphorically. He went up and kept going, the trajectory of the tail strike carrying him through the alien sky, through the cloud layer, through the upper atmosphere, until he was a shrinking point of dark against the stars above and then nothing visible at all.

Diana watched him go.

She stood there for three full seconds watching the place where Shade had been.

Then Kruel looked at her.

"Come then," he said.

---

Meanwhile, across the battlefield, Kelvin was having his own conversation with the concept of restraint.

His new and improved KROME suit was running at capacity, which meant it was running at a level that the previous versions of KROME had not been capable of reaching, the auxiliary arms extending outward from his back and operating independently of his main hands, all four control points directing different systems simultaneously. His left auxiliary arm was interfacing with a fallen Ares weapons platform, the Machine Awakening bringing the decommissioned system back online and redirecting its targeting protocols. His right auxiliary arm was generating a nanotech construct between two incoming one horns, a wall of dense constructed material that stopped both of them and gave three Eclipse members the window they needed to finish them.

His main hands were doing something else entirely.

The pulse weapons built into KROME’s forearms fired in sequence, each discharge concentrated through the VPT principle he had spent weeks drilling, the force focused to a point rather than spread across a surface. One horn at fifteen meters. The pulse hit its shoulder joint and the joint separated. He was already tracking the next one before the first finished falling.

He was moving at a speed the suit had not been designed to sustain continuously.

He didn’t care.

Because through the feed from the drone camera he had positioned over the southern ruins, he could see Diana.

She was still in there. Still fighting. Still doing the thing she had decided to do the moment she saw Kruel standing at the water’s edge, which was refuse to stop regardless of what the math said about stopping.

"Diana," he said into the comm. Static. She had pulled it out. He knew she had pulled it out. He had watched her do it on the drone feed and had said seventeen things into the comm in the thirty seconds following that she had not heard any of.

A two horn grabbed an Eclipse member by the leg and swung them into the ground and the impact produced a sound that had no comfortable analogy and Kelvin looked at it and something in his chest did something complicated and he looked back at the drone feed and Diana was still there and the two horn was right in front of him and he hit it with everything the suit had on its right side simultaneously.

The two horn went somewhere.

Far enough that it stopped being a problem.

Three Eclipse members were yelling his name.

He looked at them. At the incoming wave of one horns behind them. At the drone feed showing Diana taking a hit that moved her twenty meters and getting back up.

He made a decision right there and then.

He went beast mode.

The Foundry Protocol activated and the area around Kelvin became something different. Not a battlefield. A production zone. The available materials, fallen harbinger bodies, ruin stone, the wreckage of what had been equipment, all of it feeding into a rapid construction process that Kelvin directed with all four hands simultaneously. Defensive emplacements appearing where Eclipse members needed cover. Weapons being assembled from components that had been something else thirty seconds ago. The Remote Dominion extending outward and connecting every active machine on his section of the battlefield into a single coordinated system that he ran from the center of it like a conductor who happened to also be an instrument.

He could not go to Diana.

He knew he could not go to Diana.

This was war. He had a job. She had a job. Follow the plan or more people died. They’d talked about this and he believed with the shield, with Shade, with Diana’s stubborn determination, she’d be fine.

’She has to,’ Kelvin thought.

He hit the next wave of one horns with a coordinated pulse from six separate emplacements simultaneously and the line broke and he moved forward into the gap and the three Eclipse members followed and the next thing came and he dealt with it and didn’t look at the drone feed for forty five seconds because forty five seconds was how long it took to stop looking at a thing you couldn’t do anything about.

---

Seraleth was above all of it.

The Faithful Feathers carried her at a height where she could see the full shape of the engagement below, the battle spread across the shoreline and the ruins and the shallow water between them, Eclipse and Ares and task force moving through waves of one horns and two horns with the specific violence of people who had been preparing for exactly this and knew it and were using everything they had.

A three horn came out of the water.

It was larger than the two horns by a margin that made the two horns look like a preliminary argument. Three horns on its forehead, the third one growing backward along its skull, and it moved through the shallow water without slowing, the resistance of it meaning nothing to something that dense and that committed.

It grabbed an Ares soldier by the torso.

Seraleth dove.

Sovereign Descent. She came from altitude at a speed that compressed the air ahead of her into a cone of pressure, the Faithful Feathers pulling her downward rather than slowing her, and she hit the three horn across the back of the skull with both feet at a velocity that drove its face into the water and the shockwave from the landing launched the Ares soldier sideways out of its grip and sent ripples across every water surface within fifty meters.

The three horn came up.

It looked at her.

She looked back.

The Feather Arsenal broke from her wings in a volley, forty hardened feather blades launching from every angle simultaneously, finding joints and eyes and the soft tissue at the base of the horns, and the three horn bled from seventeen points at once and was already healing and was already reaching for her.

She went up.

It followed.

A three horn jumping was not something the human brain easily processed. The mass of it and the height it achieved were numbers that didn’t fit together until the evidence of them was directly in front of you. It got to her level in one jump and its fist came around at an angle that would have removed her from the sky if it connected.

She wasn’t where it expected her to be.

Aerial Supremacy. She changed direction mid-air without the arc that physics usually demanded, instant and total, and the fist went through the space where she had been and she was already above it and the Rallying Sky was running, the allies below her moving faster and hitting harder and coordinating better because she was in the air above them and the relic did what it did.

She wrapped the Guardian Plumage around two task force members below her who were about to be hit by a two horn’s tail and the barrier absorbed the strike and both of them lived and kept fighting.

The three horn landed and looked up at her and she looked down at it and neither of them was done.